Flooring

Rugs in your Attic

What you class as junk could be seen as someone else’s treasure, that’s why we believe, in our humble experience, you should never throw anything away.

Particularly if it’s in the attic.  You only need to watch a bit of Cash In Your Attic to know that the humble room at the top of the house is a treasure trove of tasty secrets.  Here’s an example, and it’s a true story.  A man was clearing out his attic when he stumbled across a rug.  It was 3ft by 5ft and looked pretty for a rectangular rug.  He almost threw it away thinking he didn’t need it in his modern house.  Had he done that he would have thrown away a thousand pound rug.

Unbeknown to him, what was in his hand was a Henri Matisse rug.

While Picasso, Miro and other artists of the early 20th century had designed various floor coverings, this was the first and only pattern that Matisse specifically designed for rugs.
But how did it get into this guy’s attic?  It turns out, his father-in-law used to work for Alexander Smith and Sons, a famous carpet manufacturing company running since the early 1800s.  In the heady days of the 1950s Henri Matisse travelled to America and asked Alexander Smith to turn his artwork, based on a paper-cut collage, into a woollen rug that would proudly sit on any floor.
Only 500 pieces of this artistic rug were ever made and one of the Mimosa rugs must have been given to the father-in-law.

So, be very careful next time you think about throwing away your rugs, it could be a designer rug in disguise.

Tags: designer rugs, Henri Matisse, livingroom rugs